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poopinmymouth posted:Good, because you'd be wrong, and most likely have no good reasoning for your viewpoint other than gut feeling. A mixed composition or reconstruction in any other medium is referred to as such (ex. matte painting, collage, mixed media).  edit: Here are some photos I've really been enjoying recently.  Herbert Ponting. An Iceberg in Midsummer, Antarctica, 1910-13.  Dunmore and Critcherson (of J. W. Black, Boston, U.S.A.) Between the Iceberg and field-ice. Twenties Superstar fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Nov 24, 2009 |
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Nov 24, 2009 20:18
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poopinmymouth posted:And yet, we don't in photography. Actually lot's of people refer to it as digital or analogue collage/composition. And because a photograph is a captured image or scene. If you use multiple photographs (remember a captured image or scene) to make a composite image it's just that. Burning, dodging, pushing, and pulling are completely separate to what I'm talking about. And the distinction doesn't need to be made because "OH DISHONEST PEOPLE MIGHT TRY TO TRICK YOU" or any dumb purity thing, it needs to be made because they are just separate mediums and since they are both relatively new forms of media the precedent hasn't been set and they've become needlessly (and confusingly) conflated. You say "we in photography" but that's absolutely absurd, photography is only a piece of the creative process that you describe, you can be a photographer as well as someone whose primary form of artistic expression is composition. This is so hotly contested academically simply for the fact that there is no precedent to base this on but as both mediums evolve and become more disparate it is going to become more and more important to draw the line between them. Andreas Gursky    
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Nov 25, 2009 03:15
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I don't believe that it was from a project. It's titled Krefeld and was taken in 1989 and is one of my favourite photographs by Gursky. The cable is an interesting symbol to me, the way it cuts into the frame so boldly and seems to define the geometry of the entire photo and the way it sinks into the dark under brush before it completely bisects the frame. Unfortunately that was the only image I could find online and it isn't a very good rendering of the print so it's not quite a treat as seeing it in a book or in a gallery is but there is still lot to see there.
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Nov 25, 2009 05:49
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Gambl0r posted:Lots of great photos in this thread, but this one... if it was posted in the photo-a-day threads it would get poo poo on so bad. If it was hung in a gallery with no artist label, it would get poo poo on so bad. The only thing that makes this 'good' is knowing that the photographer actually knows what he's doing in other cases. Would it actually? How would you critique it?
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Dec 6, 2009 20:59
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Gambl0r posted:It's a shot of some brush and trees with some kind of line, probably a telephone pole guidewire, intersecting it. It's uninteresting. The exposure isn't great as the highlights seem blown out. There's nothing really going on - there is no particular style to the growth of the trees, it's just... random roadside brush. The wire doesn't really lead to anything - my eye doesn't settle on any particular part of the image. This is probably related to the conversion from film to a digital image but there is a rectangle of correct-looking shadow areas in the upper right, while all the shadow areas outside of the rectangle have an ugly green cast. It's complete nothingness that is considered good because of the artist's reputation. But what can you do... that's the way the art world is. If Picasso accidentally spilled some coffee on a blank canvas and decided on a lark to sign it, that 'piece' would be extremely highly valued because of the artist's other work and resulting fame. That is exactly the case with this photo. I think you are stepping beyond a critique of the piece too much and actually trying to form a critique of art criticism and reception in general using the piece as evidence. That is a little misguided, I think, because you haven't really been able to satisfactorily tell me why the image is not a good one in the first place. You are right the image is overexposed, it was scanned incorrectly, generally it is printed to be more "correct" as you might think of it. Personally I wouldn't have posted it in this thread in the first place if I thought that the exposure of the image mattered at all in this instance. In fact, most of your critique of the image is based on irrelevant technical details. Formally you complain that the image is uninteresting but really I think that you mean it is banal in the sense that it is of something seemingly commonplace but I don't really see how that is a drawback to it. There are entire schools of photography (surprise, there are people that exclusively take images like this one and they very frequently appear in galleries without "getting poo poo on") that are devoted to capturing the interesting side of banalities. You mention how there is no particular style to the growth of the trees but why does that make the image bad? A question you might want to ask yourself is "why are these trees so unstylized?" and additionally how is the natural chaos of the trees paralleled, informed, and contextualized by the manufactured cable that runs through the scene. Clearly there is no lack of form and design in the image and clearly there IS something in this image even though you said that it was "complete nothingness." Also when you mention the cable you remark that it doesn't lead to anything which I don't agree with at all, it leads right into the bushes where it disappears, that is pretty plain to see. I've already posted a brief discussion on that aspect of the image above so I'm not going to reiterate it. To be honest I don't think your critique of "THE ART WORLD" is really needed in this thread. Why would you assume that Gursky doesn't know what he is doing with this image even though you admit that he does at other times? Do you think that maybe he took this image as a big joke on the art world or that he simply forgot what made a photo interesting and everyone else conveniently did too because "welp he's an artist and art is weird"? Don't you think that outlook is really pessimistic? Do you maybe think you should try to learn more about what you are talking about before you denounce it as "INDICATIVE OF EVERYTHING WRONG WITH THE ART WORLD"? Is your next response going to be that your five your old nephew could take this image or are you not going to stoop so low as every GBS art critic in every "COOL AND CRAZY ART" thread that's ever been posted?
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Dec 6, 2009 22:18
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I've been very careful to omit certain detailed exposition of my analysis in the discussion of the image, often I will leave an open question instead. The reason I do this is because it isn't my concern to validate that image itself or even my analysis and opinion of it to you but to promote people to think in a about it, and really just photography in general, in different way. There seems to be a general trend with internet photographers to fall in line with "interestingness" and styles that don't fall under that umbrella are considered bad based entirely on a superficial biases and other artificial constructions of "rules of photography." To do a full and proper analysis of that Gursky image would take me quite a while and I don't think it would be very productive use of my time because I doubt anyone would learn much from it. That's why I recommend avenues for thought and discussion in my posts because there are lots of ways that you can look at a photo like that, as a purely aesthetic piece and also one that is highly symbolic (ex. human construct v. nature). The thing with banality is exactly that it is banal. That's a sentence that sounds really stupid but stick with me for a second. Most amateur photographers generally try to do a couple different things: 1. Going to interesting places and taking pictures of interesting things or 2. Taking photos that appeal to basic senses (ex. attractive young woman doing attractive young woman things and fuzzy kitties and stuff). The reason I personally like banalities so much is because it's extremely regional and also extremely personal. Everybody with senses experiences banalities by it's definition. There are a couple elements that may distinguish good banalities from bad ones, this is by no means an exhaustive. Generally a good photograph will cause the viewer to look at there world they live in in a different way. From an aesthetic standpoint a photographer can use photographic techniques to expose the beauty in scenes that are seen everyday. A scene that you may pass on your bike on the way to work that you don't even think about could be photographed such to expose the balance and simplistic geometry that underlies it. A good photograph of banalities can capture animation and life in what most people think is static. A good photograph can show banal the contrasts of urban living or from a symbolic standpoint expose the conflict between humanity and the natural world that we inhabit. A photographic frame can take a three dimensional object and reduce it to something seemingly flat and non-representational. It takes a certain eye and way of thinking, something that maybe could be called talent, to decide on the proper framing, exposure, composition, etc... to properly deconstruct a scene from everyday life, the design, the surroundings, and how everything interacts on a basic geometric and symbolic level, to create something meaningful deliberately. These lines are fuzzy however, it's very possible that someone could witlessly take a great photograph of banalities without realizing it, but to reproduce that consistently is what separates "good" from "bad". That said there are many different approaches to answering you question, mine only answers it to the best of my experience that is informed greatly by my own appreciation of photography. To get a holistic view of it would require a fair bit of study and talking to quite a few people about what it is they are going for when they have a million boring pictures of traffic cones in their photostream. Most of them, myself included, will just say that they take pictures of things they see that they like and that is basically my point from the beginning.
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Dec 7, 2009 00:50
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Gambl0r posted:I didn't mean to imply that Gursky didn't think he knew he was doing when taking the photo in question... just that whatever he was trying to convey does not come across as obviously or eloquently as his other work. He must have found this subject and composition interesting or he wouldn't have taken the shot. He didn't simply forget what made a photo interesting, he just failed to do so in this particular photo. I'm sorry I'm not going to reply fully to this, I have to go to work. I'm just going to say that maybe you aren't cut out for this whole art thing.
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Dec 7, 2009 00:53
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Bread Zeppelin posted:I think he has some very fair criticisms about that image and I agree. Your attitude of "I'm not going to defend this work because none of you would understand" sucks. If it came across that way I'm sorry, I was honestly hoping to go for an attitude more along the lines of teach a man to fish. If I wrote you an essay, I'm sure similar essays already exist for that specific photo, then you could read it and you would know everything that I know and think about the picture but that's where it ends. I know it's probably terribly pretentious of me to assume that I had something to teach you but honestly that is all I wished to do. Sorry, again, for the misunderstanding.
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Dec 7, 2009 08:32
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AIIAZNSK8ER posted:these are still too abstract for me to understand. Where does the color come from? Coloured light? Where does colour come from in a regular photograph?
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Dec 13, 2009 06:39
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Haha you don't need all that much history behind you to understand that image. I offer learning about photography as a piece of advice to build a worthwhile personal aesthetic but it is by no means necessary in order to give a superficial formal analysis of an image. Regarding that image in particular (http://www.flickr.com/photos/harry_kaufmann/4410725001/sizes/l/) the attractiveness is 90% compositional which is something people naturally understand ("Good" composition is a construct built around what most people find visually appealing). To do a quick analysis of this you could examine the disparate elements and then group them together to form a compositional thumbnail in your mind. For example note the buildings on the left hand side they are not all one building but several individual ones yet when you look at the photo they convey a sense of oneness, this is partly because they are objects of similar function and style but also because they were photographed such that they are braced at top and bottom leaving contiguous lines running across from the left to center-right, there are also no breaks between the buildings. This composition is intensified by other aspects of the photo, the light poles running along the road create lines leading to the same place that the lines from the buildings run (at points the light posts align with the lines visible in the buildings). On the right hand side there are more buildings and some electrical wires and the lines in the buildings line up perfectly with the wires. Down the bottom centre of the frame there is a physical path that leads to where all these lines converge and turn a corner. All these elements come together and support each other to create a really compositionally tight image. In a less abstract discussion of the photos you can see a well maintained path carving a path through a complex run down tenements. A subjective analysis might see the photo as an image of two landscapes that have, for the necessity of a functional(?) city, to exist superimposed upon each other and as a discussion of the dialogue (or lack thereof) between them.
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Jun 2, 2010 19:12
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And that's why
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Jun 2, 2010 20:32
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Helmacron posted:Yet if you look at other photos in his pool, this compositional skill you praise muchly is not evident, is not there. Has disapparated and I do wonder if perhaps, you are conjecturing things about a photo like your english teacher conjectured about a poet laureate who, like this photographer, had no other loftier ambition than to jerk off in his sock, so to speak. Um no I'm talking about the photo not the photographer edit: :p
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Jun 2, 2010 20:41
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Z posted:Why are you still posting? Sometimes I am honestly not sure
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Jun 2, 2010 20:46
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Twenties Superstar posted:Um no I'm talking about the photo not the photographer Look, mostly we agree that it is a good photo. Some people can't see it and some people like it but can't see why. I offered, without any real knowledge of the photographer, his equipment, technique, or even really the setting that the photo captures, an analysis of some of the compositional elements in the image. I wasn't trying to pontificate on the merits of any particular style or technique my goal was to maybe help explain why, to some people, the image looks like everything just fits together. Maybe the guy who took it got lucky (successful field photographers are all, I believe, lucky to an extent) and he doesn't understand why or even if the photo is good but that discussion wasn't a part of why I made that post.
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Jun 2, 2010 20:56
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Cross_ posted:Why are there fish swimming through the bedroom? http://www.answers.com/topic/cold-fish
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Jun 2, 2010 22:46
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Regression posted:Thanks, I appreciate this. You're right, all the lines do not converge but there are a lot of lines in the photo and the most prominent ones, i.e. the ones that are informed by the most prominent features of the image, do and those lines in turn inform the way the image and the many minor lines in it are viewed in relation to one another. Here's a crappy drawing trying to explain what I mean:  Where the road winds out of view is where all of the major and most of minor lines in the photo converge. If you are following any line in the image it is likely going to end here. Here I'll note that I read the lines as moving toward to the centre of the frame probably because of the function of looking down a path. You say that the lines "should" lead your eyes around the photo and not just end but I disagree. Lines are functional and aren't just artefacts to lure into you looking at other parts of the image so you can see it all, sometimes they are going to point at specific things and that could be meaningful. Here's a good example of different types of lines in a painting from 14th century (to show how lines are used in situations of careful and totally controlled composition as well as how they have been used this way for a long time):  Follow the lines of the sitting group and you'll notice that it is just going around in circles, similar in manner to how you described an image might be "ideally", so that you see the image of Christ repeatedly and the faces of his bereaved followers. But note the rocky outcrop in the background which leads straight to the face of Christ. If you aren't paying close attention you might even miss it but it is there to draw your eye straight to the figure and terminate there. How this relates back to the photo under discussion has to do with how lines need not give you necessarily something to look at but something to think about. We've already discussed how the composition of the photo may not be by intent of the photographer but under an isolated analysis all lines converging on a point that is, in the image, obscured from view may result in curiosity as to what is around the bend or, in my case, I get a sense of satisfaction that the photo so neatly completes itself. The former being an analysis predicated on the photo being open form where my view of it is conducive to more closed form. The photo is taken from a stand-and-shoot position but if it was taken from any other position then likely a lot of the interesting compositional elements wouldn't line up so neatly. The appearance of extreme order in a seemingly chaotic "snapshot" is part of what makes contemporary topographics so interesting to me. Regarding colour and exposure my feelings are that it gives the image a natural appearance which is desirable to me given the analysis of order in chaotic nature mentioned above. I'm curious to see if you can try and explain why you like this image:  given you're rejection of images taken from a stand-and-shoot position Twenties Superstar fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Jun 2, 2010 |
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Jun 2, 2010 23:39
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I think a good case could be made in pulling out a sense of "where the male gazes at the female, the female gazes at the birds." Which is especially interesting considering some of the discussion of the photo in this thread 
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Jun 4, 2010 03:01
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I'm not a fan of the style, I don't like seeing it in his portraiture, personal, or commercial work but I know that Wired magazine is going to cut a fat check to whatever advertiser uses him to sell their product so in the argument of whether or not he is right or wrong to do it that way I think he is very very right. Contemporary micro-zeitgeist etc
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Jul 3, 2010 19:09
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This might seem surprising but there is more to photography than camera settings!!
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Oct 18, 2010 08:46
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A5H posted:What is good about this? It looks cool, there's like a little dark guy in a big white rectangle with some stripes and then there's an even bigger grey rectangle which is in another white rectangle
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Feb 5, 2011 02:24
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Cross_ posted:Those look like trapezoids to me Why?
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Feb 5, 2011 04:43
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Paragon8 posted:You could argue that it has pretty sloppy composition. The horizontals aren't' level and the figure is framed awkwardly. In pretty much any form of art some dead guy thousands of years ago figured out a bunch of rules that if followed your painting/choral arrangement/whatever is probably going to look or sound pretty good. Photography picked up a lot of these rules from painting and as a result it is, along with painting and music, still taught under the same guidelines because once you know how to make something that looks how you like it then you are pretty much free to do whatever you want whether it be following the rules or breaking them. In this particular photo you point out that the framing is awkward (something that you don't qualify at all) and that the horizontals aren't levelled. I guess I would ask you why that even matters. It's not the worlds most exciting image but I think what the photographer was going for (i.e. this looks pretty cool I'll take a photo of it (more on this later)) is pretty clearly expressed without having the horizontals levelled or with perfect framing (an idea that still perplexes me). Photography is a unique medium in that you are essentially capturing what you see. The transformation from what is real to an image on a print or on canvas is not nearly as abstracted as it is in painting. As a result you can pretty much take a picture of anything that you run across. It is entirely possible that when this photo was taken the photographer had no idea what exactly about the scene was interesting but after it was printed it becomes extremely clear. Is it a failure on the part of the artist that they didn't know what affected them to take a photo before they took it? I would argue that it isn't because obviously something about the scene was interesting to them. In this case particularly I'm sure that the photographer new what was going on because the person in the photo was very deliberately placed in the frame and the distances from the garage door to the side of the frame is mostly uniform. It's possible that the photo was taken like that because "it looked right" but I don't really see how that informs a lack of intent. Finally the photo was was taken with an instant camera (and that it was scanned to show the borders, including time stamp). I would believe you if you said that whatever interactions the border holds with the frame were unintentional on part of the artist but I think that's it's a fallacy to suggest that the intent of the artist is relevant in a critical analysis of the formal elements of a work. When you are criticizing a work of art you are essentially recreating it in your mind. Each element becomes an abstraction based on your values. Northrop Frye argues in his essays Anatomy of Criticism (admittedly they are about literature but I think they are still relevant here) that the artists intent is only their personal criticism of the work. He uses Shakespeare as an example saying that the bards intent in his writing is completely unknown and it is only by people hundreds of years later "filling in the blanks" that we have come to a group consensus on what Shakespeare was about. Returning to the original point I would say that one could argue that the fact that this is an instant photo implies a certain off-the-cuffness (corroborated by the time stamp, just a day in the life) and that the sloppy geometry of the image itself is contrasted to the perfect rectangle of the frame. Similarly, the dirty white and grey in the image is contrasted to the perfect whiteness of the border. Was this the original intent of the photographer? Maybe, but probably not. I don't think that it matters in the least because its a cool looking photo that shows something other than what you see every day browsing photo forums and flickr. poopinmymouth posted:I mean, we could just put every single image from every photographer and say it's good and if you don't like it, you don't understand. At some point there needs to be some kind of aesthetic appeal. I'm not going to try to tell you that you don't like it, it sounds like you do, but it's a very boring and uninteresting photo. Especially compared to most of the other ones in that same post. It would seem like based on what criticisms you might get online and from the general public that every photo needs to be something exciting (like a sunset over a vast plain or an attractive women or some gnarled old man or something) that looks great because it followed the rules or has some kind of historical relevance. Well I think that's a bad way to think. I see a lot of beauty in banality and feel that there is a lot that can be expressed by it. Most of life is banal and I think the best way to tap into capturing most of life is by tapping into that banality. I choose to do this primarily by taking photos that show the interaction between nature and humanity. Showing how people conform to what is natural and how nature conforms to and is moulded by people. Imaging the strange products and ironies of people in how they live and form the world around themselves is really interesting to me. Most people might see that and think that it's boring and bland because they see that stuff everyday but as a photograph it becomes an expression of the weird things in life that are just accepted as normal. In my personal life I go to school to study geography which, in its current academic incarnation, is the study of the interactions between people and space. The way that how I think and my approach to photography is, I feel, deeply informed by my field of study.
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Feb 5, 2011 20:40
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brad industry posted:tl;dr photos like that emphasize a photographic way of seeing that is unique to photography Basically 
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Feb 5, 2011 21:06
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I'm sure there are people out there who would (wrongly) say that a photo taken with film is inherently better than a digital one but I don't really see what that has to do with this discussion whatsoever. edit: Peter Granser is a photographer who takes really good pictures     
Twenties Superstar fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Feb 6, 2011 |
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Feb 6, 2011 04:29
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evil_bunnY posted:Much harder to show just how articulate you are in just one line, though. Haha, I didn't write a million words on some crappy photo in a forum where nobody reads my posts anyway to show off how articulate I am. I know I'm not very articulate and I know that explaining some basic art theory is not going to make me look like some super erudite guy when there are people here (brad industry for one) with much more knowledge and experience than I who can reduce my points so concisely. I just love photography and I think about it a lot and I see a lot of people here who also seem to love photography but don't know how to deal with a photograph that was taken with different values in mind then what they are used to. All that I really want to do is show that there are other ways to think about things and there is more to photography than nice views.
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Feb 7, 2011 18:51
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xzzy posted:drat, I had no idea that the glow from atom bombs could be seen so far away. Talk about light pollution. one thing 2 take away from this is that ppl have been taking pictures of dancers in unusual contexts since at least 1952 think b4 u shoot ppl
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Sep 25, 2016 16:26
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